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Originally written by The Dog And Pony Show:

[b]Keep in mind here I'm speaking of PHP 4 and below; PHP 5 is not yet deployed enough to be worth discussing.

PHP is a poorly designed language. It has a very weak module system, and almost all of the standard library is loaded by default.
> This is true. But is the speed decrease significant?

It takes the atrocious and ugly syntax of Perl (universal sigils, etc.) without the actual useful bits (primitive regexes).
> I presume by 'sigil' you mean the variable prefix ($). I think it helps clarify the code and eases readability.
> Primative regexes- I can only assume you're talking about something like
> $a = /regexp/
> $a->match($wtf);
> I haven't taken the time to learn Perl regexes -
> I usually use POSIX.

In general, you can't choose what parts of the standard library get loaded or not at runtime. Oh, and I haven't seen any evidence of namespaces at all.
> The point is that *why* you would need
> namespaces in a web-based environment. PHP is a
> sort of 'Web-dev RAD system that yet manages to
> not be evil like most RAD systems'. In PHP5
> various OO functions were introduced, but I
> recall reading an article that generally
> said "Why the hell would you need this in web
> -dev anyway?".

Until recently, the default behavior was to automatically load CGI arguments into global variables, which is of course absurdly foolish.
> I agree that it was rediculous. They have fixed this nastiness. Why dwell on their past mistakes?

PHP encourages the mixing of data and code. Some people might consider its HTML embedding to be an advantage; I consider it to be a major flaw. Any good code would eschew such obfuscation, and most significant PHP projects do.
> The flexibility of PHP (particularly how if(){ ?> conditional HTML ?php } is valid syntax) is
> partially to blame for HTML embedding. But providing the developer is careful and responsible enough this can be avoided. I'm sure there are tons of *Perl* programs out there which are crappily written.
[?php is due to UBB's crappy HTML filtering.]

Its object model has been historically either nonexistent or hackish. This may not be interesting to procedural programmers, but it is a major flaw in my eyes.
> Are you complaining about how they implemented OO in the C sourcecode or what?

It depends heavily on pragmas and other global configuration settings, due to the aforementioned lack of granularity.
> Again, what the hell are you blabbering about.

PHP is, in general, an ugly, hackish language that shows its original purpose as a glorified SSI system in every wrinkle and crack.
> Really? Provide examples.
http://www.bitstorm.org/edwin/en/php-sucks/[/URL][/QB]

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quote:

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Originally written by ARRR-enax:

And yet PHP is incredibly popular and used way more often than Ruby is.

So the market decrees you are wrong, Djur. :D (Not that I don't disagree--PHP is rather hackish--but it's good for what it does. I just pity the people who don't know any other language.)

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